All posts tagged Sigmar Polke. photography

Instead of uplifting shots of the swinging 60s we’ve all heard about, this show focuses on 12 photographers from around the world whose pics show in pitiless detail the exploitation, fear and the violence of our world 50 years ago.

I chatted to another visitor who described it as ‘hard core’. Only visit if you’re feeling pretty tough-minded. The exhibition continues until 13 January 2013.

The ground floor is dominated by black and white photos of racism in apartheid South Africa and the American deep South.

1. Ernest Cole (1940-90) was a black South African who managed to evade the apartheid laws to get trained as a photographer and take wideranging photos of the black experience. Forced into exile in 1967 he published his photos in a harrowing book, House of Bondage, and died in poverty.

2. David Goldblatt (b.1930) a white South African who has investigated his strange country through photographs for fifty years. His candid pics of the white community all too often reveal the brutality and crudeness of the Afrikaans ruling class.

3. Bruce Davidson (b.1933) an American and member of the famous Magnum company. In 1961 he joined the Freedom Riders making a terrifying journey by bus from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson Mississippi, the start of a 4-year project to document the Civil Rights movement and portrayed in his book, Time of Change

4. William Eggleston (b.1939) another white American, born in Memphis and so who grew up in the troubled South. He puzzled critics with his lack of references to the social turmoil of the Civil Rights movement all around him, preferring to take oblique and elliptical images, as part of his “war on the obvious”. I liked his photos. They capture for me that sense of alienation and gritty oddness which I like in the independent American movies of the early 70s.

5. Graciela Iturbide (b.1942) Mexican and the only woman in the exhibition, Graciela identified strongly with the native peoples of Mexico who she photographed against the backdrop of the vast desert, and with the urban poor whose grim but often surreal lives she documented.

6. Boris Mikhailov (b.1938) lived and worked in Kharkov at the height of Soviet domination of the Ukraine. So repressive was the regime that Mikhailov lost his job as an engineer when the KGB found photos of his naked wife at their flat. The exhibition shows disturbing multi-image compositions from a series called ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich/Superimpositions’, deformed images of a society deformed by repression and fear and crushing poverty, often dwelling on the naked human image which was so feared and banned by the authorities.

7. Shomei Tomatsu (b.1930) the godfather of Japanese photography, Shomei became obsessed with America’s military occupation of Japan following the Second World War and was drawn to the army bases on Okinawa in the 1960s, where the B52s took off to bomb Vietnam. That said, tut there are plenty of quirky b&w photos of Japanese street scenes, too.

9. Li Zhensheng (b.1940) took photos for a regional newspaper during China’s disastrous Cultural revolution, 1966-76. After completing his official assignments he always took a few extra ‘arty’ pics, experimenting with point of view, especially of the vast rallies of the time. At immense risk he buried these negative negatives under the floorboards to be discovered later by his family, thus creating the only complete visual record of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

10. Malick Sidibe (b.1935) took photos in his studio of the unofficial youth culture which flourished underground in Mali under the severe dictatorship of Moussa Traore, who ruled until 1992. Wearing a miniskirt could get you sent to a re-education camp, so Sidibe’s pics of kids determined to have a good time to the music of the Beatles, Stones and James Brown are all the more edgy and exuberant. And bizarre.

11. Raghubir Singh (1942-99) used colour as a deliberate counter to the monochromatic angst of fashionable American photographers like Diane Arbus. He’s quoted as saying: “The fundamental condition of the West is one of guilt linked to death – from which black is inseparable. The fundamental condition of India, however, is the cycle of rebirth, in which colour is a deep inner source.” Hmm. Discuss. His images are certainly highly coloured and scrappily composed, busy, ad hoc, chaotic, like teeming India herself. Included on the Google Images page I link to is a famous image of a red car, shot from the side, probably his most famous image but uncharacteristically composed, as the others show.

12. Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), a German. Travelling the hippy route to Afghanistan Sigmar stopped to photograph a brutal village sport, a fight between two dogs and a bear. Polke deliberately spoilt the photos in the development stage, letting the colours run to create a visionary sequence, frayed images of chaotic conflict which seemed to foreshadow the ruinous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet army in 1979. Later in his career Polke became a painter specialising in collage and superimposition.

The above sequence, listing these fascinating and inspiring photographers, makes the show seem much more varied and sparky than it actually is. The impact of image after image after image of the poverty, violence and exploitation undergone by blacks in South Africa or 1960s America, have a battering affect on the soul, which is compounded by the atrocities of Maoist China and the explicit images of war and despair in Vietnam.